by Shannon Kirk
“Mop,” she says without the slur she had when she first said my name in the attic.
Yesterday, the hatchet woman burst in on me finding my companion alive in the attic. Everything was quick, but then prolonged and bizarre after that. It feels like the last day has lasted ten years. What she put us through, the depravity, the insanity, what I’ve seen and heard in the last day—I will never be the same. I can either choose to remain at the bottom of my own inner well, lost, or I can grow strong and resolute. I have no other choices: such trauma means I’ll be planted in one of those extremes. I fight for the latter. I fight for strength and conviction.
“Unchain her and walk to the barn!” Crazy Hatchet screamed at us in the attic. She hoisted the hatchet high above her head, ready to strike.
Thankfully the ring of house keys I snatched from the pink birdhouse had one for my companion’s ankle chain lock.
I carry-walked her, slow and gentle down the stairs, while Crazy Hatchet followed on our heels, laughing every time we tripped.
“She can’t walk well, and I’m the one who had no PT! Weak Vandonbeer, a mutt’s mix of races, really. Mutts, all you fucking Vandonbeers.”
I have no idea what she meant by any of this. I concentrated on getting my companion to the barn. I didn’t ask where Aunty was. I didn’t want to know. But Crazy Hatchet offered anyway.
After we reached the center of the barn, by way of the unchained front barn doors—for it appeared Crazy Hatchet disrupted Aunty midrounds—Crazy told me to sit my companion and myself on the floor of the barn in the center. Two stalls to our right, two to our left. Next she tied my arms behind my back with quarter-inch rope, then my companion’s, then our legs. Next she duct-taped our mouths. I had to comply because she kept the hatchet out of my reach and stood between me and my companion, who was too weak to stand and run on her own. If I didn’t comply with being tied, I wouldn’t have been able to save my companion from a hatchet swing.
“Do you know where Lynette Viola Vandonbeer is?” Crazy Hatchet singsonged, standing and lording over us, while we sat on the concrete barn floor.
I shook my head in fast micromovements, as if shivering in a Sub-Zero freezer.
“Oh,” she said, puffing out her chest and standing tall, as if my answer truly surprised her. “Okay,” she said and turned and walked over to the shipping-crate stage in the corner, the one Manny and I used to use. As she wore a blue-and-white hospital gown, tied in the back, the fabric didn’t cover her spine or naked ass crack. “Your aunt’s dead, over there.” She pointed with the hatchet, toward the side room, her back still to us, and nonchalant.
My companion gasped and gagged under her duct tape; I stared on. I didn’t know what to believe. I wiggled my toes in my companion’s ribs to tell her I was here with her and to be quiet. She seemed to get the message and swallowed her tears. The bond between mother and daughter has been proven to be interweaved at the literal cellular level. Pieces of my mother’s biology are in me, and, true fact, pieces of my cells are in her brain, racing around in the neurons of her mind. Perhaps this is why I struggled at such a profound and disturbing level in trying to accept her death, for I knew in my body and soul and mind, cells and breath, it was not true.
Crazy Hatchet dragged the stage closer to us in center and as she did, the prop box atop shifted, and the sailing-sails curtains swayed.
“What’s in this box? Hmm,” she said, calm, disconnected to the fact that blood soiled her dressing gown. She fingered the hatchet by her side, rocked bare feet like a savage, and held two women in ropes and duct tape in the center of a barn. In flipping off the lid, she shook her head and pffted, as if indicating what she saw was obvious. “My dress and underwear. Of course.”
She held her find for us to see: that awful, hand-stitched, navy-blue-on-blue gown I saw her wear two years ago on the rocks. As she pulled it from the box, rust-red and brown bloodstains blotched both blues.
She extracted her dress and underwear from the prop box, lumping them on the floor of the stage, and then sent forth a horrifying laugh. How her shrieking laugh reverberates to me now, one day later, as I scrape my fingernails into the muddy dirt, outside the burned basement, trying to lift my body off the ground while a woman in black holds Crazy Hatchet in a standoff by aiming a nail gun at her face. That shriek, here by the hole, cuts through thunder, slices sideways rain, so shrill and insane.
And yesterday she sure did shriek in her laughter on that sailing sails–curtained stage. My and my companion’s shoulders rose around our ears to muffle the painful screech. Nothing worked. Then she stopped. Yanked her bloody hospital gown off, pulled on the dried-blood, homemade gown, and hiked up her yellow underwear. After pacing the stage like an inpatient in a corner of an asylum’s rec room and staring dumblike with dead eyes to a pigeon in the rafters, cooing at him in a lethargic bird language as he flew beam to beam, she plunked on her ass in a pfft, landing in a thud on the shipping-crate stage. Fist to chin and elbow to thigh, she sat staring at me and my companion, blinking every few seconds, for several endless hours. As in, the remainder of the day and into the night, she stared and stared and we could do nothing, say nothing.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I was doing something. With my feet.
At some point around sevenish, I’m guessing, based on the lower lighting, my iPhone rang in my back pocket. All day it had been vibrating with text messages I knew had to be from Manny, wondering where I was, so I knew that sometime around dinner he’d call, concerned. And indeed, he did. Before Crazy Hatchet could explode, as her immediate red face and jerk of the head indicated she would, I shook my head in a way to tell her it was okay.
“Where’s your phone!” she thundered. But like a dentist, she asked a question to a patient without the ability to answer back. Realizing this, she scooched her ass across the stage and stood. Her wacko dress scrunched up as she did, revealing her yellow underwear. She stomped over to me, pushed me face-first into the concrete, and since I couldn’t brace my face and not wanting to break my nose, I turned my head, forcing my cheek to crack on the concrete. Fishing around in my ass, she found my phone. It rang and rang and rang.
“Says Manny. Who’s that?” she yelled.
Still, I could not answer.
She ripped the duct tape from my mouth.
“Who is Manny! Will he be looking for you?”
“Yes! Yes! He will look for me if I don’t answer!” I said, because I did not want Manny coming here, looking for me. I didn’t want him hurt by this awful woman. I needed to get a message to him to not come, and bonus, if I could send a coded message, to call the cops.
“Ha! You think I’m an idiot. You’re not going to answer or send him a message. How hilarious!” And that shriek again. Oh, how it cuts my soul in long strips to remember. So high, so evil and aching.
“He will start looking for me soon!” I pleaded.
“Whatever. I’m not dumb. All you young bitches think I don’t know technology. I’ll text him back for you. He’s the one you were fucking against the side of the barn the other day. I get it.”
Sitting next to me on the concrete, taunting me with the phone in her hands, she showed me every move she made on my phone, as if I were her best friend in the world, surfing the internet for hot guys together. She waited out the ringing, and presumably Manny left a message. Then she went to my text screen and easily found Manny’s last message: Mop, aren’t you coming back for dinner? Pick up. I’m starting to worry.
Then she wrote back as if she were me: Staying at my aunt’s tonight. She’s sad. I’ll call in morning. Don’t worry.
My only hope was that Manny would detect the problem with the text, the fact that “I” referred to Aunty as “my aunt,” which I had never before done. He should have remembered that I always called her Aunty, like a proper name. But wasn’t it delusional hope that he’d somehow jump to the unbelievable conclusion that I was being held by a madwoman with a hatchet in “my aunt’s” barn? Ind
eed, delusional, strained, contrived. Telepathy offered better odds, and I can’t perform telepathy. He’d never come to that conclusion about the text.
Crazy Hatchet replaced the duct tape and took my iPhone back to the stage and spent the whole night reading the internet, interjecting surprise, although subdued and apathetic, at stories she missed in her confinement in Aunty’s barn. She’d pfft and say “of course” or “I knew it” to whatever news she read, revealing the high opinion she held of herself: she knew all and all possible outcomes. So superior of knowledge, an omniscient, doubt-free being in a bloody gown. She regaled us, too, with celebrity obituaries and ended each reading with a high, scratching, rattling laughter that shreds my soul to remember. At around, guessing here, maybe one in the morning, my companion passed out on my legs, which was a good thing, for her body covered my working feet.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
MOP
Present time
This morning we awoke on the floor of the barn to the sounds of weak moaning from Aunty in the side room. I still didn’t know her condition. I guessed it was bad, based on the blood on Crazy Hatchet’s discarded hospital gown. I and my companion stirred on the floor. I hadn’t realized I’d fallen asleep until screeching awoke me.
“YOU DIE!” Hatchet yelled from the stage, cranking her head toward the side room, through which we could not see, for the doorway was down the wall, away from us.
But Aunty’s moaning continued. Crazy Hatchet again scooched off the stage, stomped into the side room, and what I heard next curdled my soul. My companion stiffened and shook on my legs.
A thwack, thwack, clatter and cling of metal beat down upon the moaning, a fleshy metal thwacking, until the moaning stopped. Next came an exaggerated throat clearing, deep inhale, and forceful spit.
“No more from you, whore!” Crazy Hatchet said in the side room. And when she reappeared before us, fresh blood splattered her blue-blue gown and sprinkled her face and hair. My companion sobbed under her duct tape, convulsing on my legs. I stared up at the woman who just beat my aunt to a very presumed death with the metal bedpan in her bloody hands.
She bounced her weapon in one palm, holding it with the other. Blood plunked down and splattered in front of me. The woman ignored my companion and addressed only me.
“I’ve been thinking all night,” she said, grinding her teeth in a literal and loud way, like trying to scrape ink paper for a dentist fitting your mouth for implants.
“And I have to kill you both, you know that. I can’t have any witnesses. And it’s perfect, makes a perfect three: you, your mother, your aunt. One, two, three . . . one, two, three,” she said in a trailing of thoughts she seemed to have with herself. She lowered her head to us on the floor. “But you deserve to know what happened that night, two years ago, and why I will shut you and your dumb mother up forever, because I can’t be blamed, I can’t be framed. That’s what I’ve decided, and you need to know why. So we’re going to have a play. Manny won’t be coming to see, boo hoo. He tried to come here last night, but I stopped him. He’s dead behind the barn now. Right there, right out back,” she said, pointing with a lazy arm to behind the barn. “So you have no reason to live anymore, bitch, and you will watch my play and then die. Boo-fucking-hoo.” She turned to her stage and readied items she’d set up, mumbling to herself a chant, “One, two, three . . . one, two, three . . . one, two, three . . .”
My mother used to offer cushioned warnings about how Aunty Liv would sometimes have “outbursts” or go catatonic and stare. She’d say this after catching me staring off into the middle distance, and when she did, she’d hug me and sit me down by pressing on both my arms. “Babycakes, you know your aunty Liv, she gets quiet, too, and stares like this. Doctors say she can get catatonic. This is why she’s a nurse, darling. She says the control and concentration helps her to stay straight. But this scares me. Are you okay?”
“Mom,” I’d say, “I’m just thinking on a question raised in my book. That’s all. Trying to figure on the answer.”
“My smarty girl, my thinky thinker,” she’d say, and kiss my nose.
This morning, my companion mother couldn’t sit me down and kiss my nose to break my catatonic state. I just stared, unable to begin the thought of Manny lifeless outside. An impossibility. Something I’d never agree to believe.
My mother shook her body against my legs to nudge me to blink. But there was no way I’d blink first, not before the bitch on the stage, who stared back. Who would be the victor in our now declared battle to the death? I told her with my eyes that I’d be the vicious victor. Whether out of defense or vengeance, I fixed upon destroying her. How dare she say such a thing about Manny. Manny could not die. He is eternal.
Crazy blinked. I stared on. I turned off my thoughts on Manny, on her claiming to murder him behind the barn. I watched her as she moved around her stage, preparing herself for her one-woman play.
No idea why she felt she had to show us what happened that night, the night of the fire. I only know that insanity creates fabrications of reason in each person’s mind so inexplicable to the outside, there can be no way to diagram any sort of rationale. I steadied myself to watch, so she would focus only on me watching, and not on my feet. Calming my breathing and lowering my eyes, I gave the appearance of meditation so intense, Gandhi would be proud.
This was this morning, and already the hurricane had started. Wind picked up outside the barn, not in the riotous way it is right now, at night, at the height of the storm, but in a rising strength, enough to know that children would be at Ocean Lawn flying kites, high and higher.
Crazy Hatchet moved to the stage, still holding her hatchet, pointing the blade at me. A slap of wind shook the rafters. I continued my low-lid stare; she jabbed the air with the hatchet in my direction. My companion stiffened; this threat to her daughter stopped her crying. I could almost feel my companion embolden, as only a mother can. A mother in protection. And yet, in that moment, this morning, I could not bring myself to look at her with daughter eyes in pleading, as a child, begging for protection, for I could only accept her as a vessel of a human, no more than my companion.
Crazy Hatchet flung one side of the sailing curtain farther open to reveal she’d set some items up in the night. Atop a cardboard box, she’d duct-taped a broke-neck, balding doll in a sitting position. Manny and I used to employ this doll in our plays—LexiCat, we called her. A couple of the ubiquitous tissue rose petals from our rose-thief-fox play stuck in her hair. Crazy had obviously extracted LexiCat from the prop box. She moved around slump-shouldered and lethargic, as if this entire act, the self-imposed drudgery of her having to put on her show and her having to be in the barn with her hostages, bored her.
“That’s your bitch mother, Johanna Vandonbeer Pentecost, right there on your aunt’s stove. I duct-taped her on the burners. Remember, Johanna?” She addressed my companion this time, and pffted out her lazy nonchalance. Her chronic pffting was a nervous tic. She indicated that the doll LexiCat, duct-taped to the cardboard box, was a rendition of my mother duct-taped on top of Aunty’s black gas stove.
“Now I will play the role of me and your whore aunt slash sister,” she said, nodding to me and then my mother. She blinked three times, slow, and seemed like she was grazing in a field. She swished the other sailing-sail curtain farther open to reveal another box and a chair behind it, so a table and a chair, and a basket of laundry on the box. She took three steps to the chair, sat, and started folding the laundry in the basket: underwear and towels. She hummed the mellow carnival tune of Paul Simon’s “America,” the cadence one for a night spin on a slow carousel.
“I was innocently folding the laundry in your aunt’s kitchen, folding her underwear, well, in threes,” she said, adding her awful laugh, as a distinct spike to the otherwise slow, bored monotone in which she spoke. I think my eardrums shriveled this time.
I didn’t need to analyze the insanity. To fold another woman’s underwear in her kitchen, af
ter duct-taping her sister to the stove, this was something I held no doubts about.
“Mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm,” she hummed again, and now I don’t think I can ever hear another Paul Simon song without thinking of a horror house of mirrors. It’s too bad, for he’s a true poet.
“Now,” she said, standing. “Pretend I’m still sitting there, being good, folding her laundry.” She towered above me from the stage, me still slumped, tied up, on the ground of the barn. “And well, there I was, folding underwear, minding my business and humming. Your mother, you, Johanna,” she said, pointing the bloody hatchet at my companion, “were helping me concentrate by staying good and quiet and taped on the stove.”
“Ayup,” she said, swiveling around toward the laundry basket on the table and the phantom ghost of herself sitting there. Sashaying the blood-crusty skirt of her homemade dress, she continued, “So there I was.” At the edge of the stage, she paused, and in a slow cautious bend, set her hatchet on the corner of the shipping-crates stage, wormed her hand, still cautious, behind the folds in the curtains, and pulled out one of Aunty Liv’s yellowware bowls. She must have retrieved it from the house while I dozed off in the night. She bounced the bowl with one hand into the palm of her other, like she did the bedpan.
“But in came your whore aunt and ruined everything! She beat me with a bowl!”
Crazy Hatchet leaped toward the mock cardboard table so unexpected and fast, holding the bowl aloft in a gesture that she was about to beat her own shadow in the chair, that she miscalculated her steps, wedging her still bare feet in the slats of the shipping crate.
